With the U.S. population increasing at the rate of about 2.5 million a year (with most of that related to arriving immigrants and high birth rates of resident foreign-born mothers) and with our frayed infrastructure becoming more feeble and more crowded with every passing day, any decrease in birth rates in any U.S. population is good news.

This article, as many others on the subject, focused on an immediate bit of news (the dropping birth rates) as did the underlying Pew Research Center Study without paying much attention to the unpleasant background situation.

That grim and unreported news is that the country's population is increasing at unsustainable levels, and that one of the major reasons for that is the high birth rates of foreign-born women. The current dip in birth rates, welcome as it is, does not detract from the much higher birth rates of foreign-born women as compared to U.S.-born women. In 2010, births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 (the standard measure) were:

Foreign-born women: 87.8

U.S.-born women: 58.9

The birth rate for immigrant women is almost half again as high as it is for U.S.-born women; it is 149 percent of the rate of the latter group.

That's the vital part of the news that the media is either blind to, or seeks to downplay.

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985.
It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic,
fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.